With the Booker Prize shortlist out, the bookies have updated the odds. Tom McCarthy’s C emerges as the new favorite and Peter Carey and Andrea Levy are surprising long shots.
Booker Prize Shortlist Odds
New David Mitchell Cover
David Mitchell’s anticipated novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, now has a cover. It appears rather dreamy and influenced by Japanese art.
Not to be Rude
Apologies for bringing this up, but in a WaPo review of Sorry!: The English and their Manners, Jonathan Yardley points out that your average English person says “sorry” eight times a day.
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The Internet Is For
“Internet-centrism, then, treats ‘the Internet’ as an object that acts on society from outside, rather than a technological form that emerges from within a particular social and political situation.” The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Evgeny Morozov’s latest critique of the digital age, To Save Everything, Click Here.
The New Great Books
“How can we represent four hundred years of American literary history in a way that doesn’t reinforce the unfortunate hierarchies of those four hundred years?” Year in Reading alum Rebecca Makkai writes for Electric Literature about the opening of the new American Writers Museum in Chicago and what it means to curate an historical canon of letters. See also: our interview with Makkai from a couple of years back.
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“I’m going out on this adventure”
“The idea was that whatever I felt or did resonated in life, caused people pain or happiness. This gave me a feeling of huge responsibility even as a child – to the extent that sometimes I had to block my own feelings or wishes. When I started writing fiction, suddenly I was allowed to do what I wanted.” Talking with Etgar Keret.
Trouble with Names
When your first name is interesting or just plain weird, you learn how not to get sick of explaining what your parents were thinking. Fortunately for Brevity editor Dinty Moore, his name is “more a gift than a burden.”
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